Not quite a story or myth but rather some reflective thoughts on the goddess herself.

We tend to think of harvest as something that begins when we start gathering things. The garden begins to empty, the fields change color, the fruit ripens on the trees, farm stands are overflowing on the side of the roads, and suddenly we find ourselves carrying baskets and bags of whatever the growing season has managed to give us. Autumn makes the harvest visible, not just all things pumpkin either. We can see what has matured, what is ready to be taken in, what needs to be pruned back, and what needs to be preserved before the cold arrives. Let’s take apples for example. Orchards are bustling with activity as parents take their little ones for an exciting fall adventure. Yet the apple harvest itself began long before the first fruit was twisted from its branch.

In the spring we are standing beneath an apple tree, watching the first blossoms open against the bare branches, smelling that softly sweet essence of new beginnings. It is there that we are already looking at the starts of the harvest. The fruit simply hasn’t arrived yet.

An apple blossom does not look much like an apple. It is small and delicate, easily damaged by a late frost or a hard wind, and it exists for only a brief part of the year. Yet within that flower is everything that may eventually become the fruit we gather months later. The apple we carry home in autumn begins its life as something that looks almost insignificant. We simply have to trust that the tree knows what it is doing. The blossom opens, the bees arrive, the fruit begins to form, and the tree spends the long months between spring and autumn turning that first fragile promise into something capable of nourishing another living thing.

This is where I find myself thinking about Iðunn. If you are here, you probably already know who she is within the source material – daughter of Ivaldi, wife of Bragi, giver of apples. What we actually get from the extant material is a goddess associated with apples, renewal, and the continued youth of the gods.

In Gylfaginning, Snorri Sturluson tells us that Iðunn is the wife of Bragi and that she keeps the apples which the gods eat when they begin to grow old, allowing them to become young again. Her importance becomes even clearer in the story of her abduction, because when Iðunn and her apples are taken away, the gods begin to age. Whatever else we might make of the story, the mythology is remarkably clear about one thing: the gods depend upon something Iðunn keeps.

Her apples are much more interesting to me than a simple magical fruit that happens to prevent wrinkles on divine faces. The apples are part of a process of renewal. Time takes something from the gods, and the apples give something back. Their youth is not simply presented as a permanent state that exists without maintenance. It is something that must be renewed. The gods consume the fruit, and what they consume becomes part of their continued existence. The apple disappears, but what it gives them remains.

Apples have accumulated an extraordinary amount of symbolic baggage throughout European mythology and folklore. The Greek stories of the golden apples of the Hesperides, for example, give us another very old image of extraordinary apples existing at the edges of the known world, protected within a sacred garden. Herakles is sent to retrieve them as one of his labors, and the story appears not only in surviving literary traditions but in ancient Greek art as well. There is also the Apple of Discord which while not consumed in the traditional sense, becomes the seed for the Trojan War. The apple is capable of carrying meanings far beyond ordinary food, becoming a fitting object for stories about extraordinary life, distant gardens, boundaries, and things that human beings could not simply obtain whenever they wished.

The Norse tradition gives the apple its own particular meaning. Iðunn’s apples are not simply beautiful or rare. They are necessary. When the gods lose access to them, they lose their youthful vigor. (Something that I am feeling more and more each day as I age.) The fruit therefore becomes connected to something much more fundamental than beauty. It becomes connected to the restoration of what time has taken away. I think that distinction is important because there is a great difference between stopping time and participating in renewal. Stopping time would mean that nothing changes. Renewal accepts that change has already happened and finds a way to continue from it.

An apple does not remain on the branch forever. It grows because it is meant to ripen, and once it has ripened, it eventually has to leave the tree. We can pick it, eat it, preserve it, cook it, press it into cider, give it to someone else, or let it fall to the ground. However the story ends for that particular apple, the fruit has completed one part of the cycle. The tree does not consider this failure. It does not spend the winter mourning the apples it no longer carries. It simply enters another part of its life. The leaves fall, growth slows, and what was visible above the ground becomes quieter. From the outside, the tree can look almost empty during the coldest part of the year. Yet the tree is not finished. It is preparing for the moment when the cycle will become visible again.

This is where I begin to understand Iðunn as a Harvest Queen. The surviving Norse sources do not call Iðunn by that title, but I do. I think it makes perfect sense for who she is and what she does. Not because she belongs exclusively to the moment when apples are gathered, but because her apples allow us to see the harvest as a complete cycle rather than a single season. If we follow the fruit backward, the harvest begins with the blossom. If we follow it forward, the harvest becomes nourishment, and nourishment becomes continued life. The apple begins as possibility, becomes fruit, is separated from the tree, and is consumed. What seems like an ending is transformed into something else. In the case of Iðunn’s apples, that something else is the renewal of the gods themselves. But what makes these seemingly ordinary apples so special?

The more I sit with Iðunn over the years, the harder it has become for me to think of her as simply the goddess who keeps a basket of magical apples. The apples are certainly important, but they are the vessel through which Iðunn’s particular power is expressed rather than the entirety of that power itself. The mythology gives her responsibility for something upon which the gods themselves depend. Her apples are what restore their youth, but it is Iðunn who keeps them, and when she is taken away, the gods do not simply lose access to a convenient source of fruit. They begin to age. The connection between Iðunn and the renewal she provides is therefore much more intimate than the familiar image of a goddess surrounded by apples might suggest.

Let’s think about that by starting with where Iðunn comes from. In the cosmology I work with, Ivaldi is Iðunn’s father and a Ljósálfar – one of the light elves, and that makes Iðunn at least partly Ljósálfar herself. I say part because her mother is never mentioned. The Ljósálfar are not some distant people entirely removed from the gods of Ásgarðr. Snorri gives us translations for god and goddess names that involve these peoples. Their realm is listed as a “tooth-gift” for Freyr, who rules over them, which gives Iðunn a thread that connects her to the elemental Vanir. I like to think of that relationship almost as an extended family connection, a kind of divine cousinhood that sits alongside the more complicated relationships between the various peoples of the worlds. She does not need to be a Vanir goddess herself to belong within that wider network. Her father’s people are under Freyr’s rule, and through them she remains connected to the Vanir world.

That connection is important because it gives another dimension to the vitality I see in Iðunn. The Ljósálfar, as I understand them within my own cosmology, carry qualities of brightness, beauty, vitality, craft, and those subtle forces that are easy to overlook precisely because they do not always announce themselves. Iðunn fits beautifully within that kind of lineage. Her power is not the explosive fertility of a field suddenly bursting into bloom, nor is it the raw physical force of the earth itself. Her power is quieter and more persistent. She tends what has already begun. She keeps vitality from being lost. She carries something living through the passage of time so that it can emerge renewed.

Freyr represents the larger abundance and vitality of the Vanir sphere, bringing that elemental connection to Idunn’s people. At the same time, Iðunn carries one very particular expression of that same underlying principle into her own work. Freyr belongs to the flourishing of life, while Iðunn concerns herself with the continuation of that life after it has already begun. If the garden is a family, she is not the one responsible for every seed, every root, or every blossom. She is the one making sure that what has begun has the strength and vitality to make it all the way home.

Then there is her marriage to Bragi. Bragi, as a “son” of Óðinn if Snorri is to be believed, is a keeper of another kind of continuity. His realm is poetry, eloquence, and the preservation of memory through words. A responsibility that compliments beautifully with Iðunn’s work of preserving vitality through renewal. The comparison is not meant to suggest that the mythology explicitly assigns them these complementary household duties, but there is something remarkably fitting about the pairing. Bragi keeps stories alive so that what has been experienced can continue to exist in memory, while Iðunn keeps the gods themselves from being worn away by time. One preserves what might otherwise be forgotten; the other renews what might otherwise diminish.

It also makes the description of Iðunn as a Harvest Queen feel less like a title I have simply placed upon her and more like a way of recognizing several different threads that already run through her story. Her father connects her to the Ljósálfar and, through Freyr’s rule, to the Vanir. Her marriage connects her to poetry, language, and memory. Her apples connect her to regeneration and the earth magic she holds dominion over. Her absence demonstrates just how dependent the gods are upon the power she guards. None of these things requires her to become a generic goddess of everything that grows. Instead, they give us a picture of a goddess whose particular responsibility is keeping vitality in motion.

Even her relationship with Loki becomes more interesting through this lens. The surviving stories give us a complicated relationship rather than a simple one. Loki is involved in the circumstances of her abduction, because Þjazi forces him to lure Iðunn outside Ásgarðr, and once she is gone the gods begin to suffer from the loss of her apples. Did Þjazi just want to marry a hot chic or was he aware of her capabilities and wanted to claim it for himself while sticking it to the Ásgarðians? With her powers no longer accessible to the Æsir, Loki is forced to help bring her back. Strangely enough, Snorri never states that Loki ages or weakens with her absence. Yet, that could be one of many reasons he specifically is pressed to bring her back. Later, in Lokasenna, Iðunn is one of the figures who attempts to intervene when Loki and Bragi are at odds, only for Loki to turn his insults toward her as well. Yet, his insults are not too grievous, almost as if he does it half-heartedly before sinking his claws into others with more relish.

In my own devotional understanding, there is something wonderfully complicated about the way Loki keeps becoming entangled with her. He helps take her away, he becomes responsible for helping return her, and he cannot quite seem to remain outside the orbit of this quiet goddess whose absence nearly brings the Æsir to their knees. Perhaps that is part of what makes Iðunn so easy to underestimate. She is surrounded by louder figures. Óðinn gathers knowledge, Þor carries Mjǫllnir, Freyja commands her own formidable powers, Loki disrupts nearly everything he touches, and Bragi has been remembered through poetry itself. Iðunn does not need that kind of spectacle. Her importance becomes apparent precisely when she is no longer there. Remove her from Ásgarðr and the gods begin to age. Take away what she keeps, and the consequences spread through the entire divine community.

I see a woman who has been entrusted with something the gods cannot simply provide for themselves. I see the daughter of a Ljósálfar, connected through her father’s people to Freyr and the Vanir, carrying that brightness and vitality into a role that is uniquely her own. I see the wife of the keeper of poetry and memory, standing beside someone whose work is also concerned with keeping something from being lost. I see a woman whose stories have been lost aside from the one that devastates the Æsir. I see a goddess whose power is quiet enough to be overlooked until the moment the world discovers what happens when she is absent. And that is the Iðunn I want standing in my garden.

Seen that way, Iðunn belongs at both ends of the harvest season. She is present in the first blossoms when the tree makes its promise, and she is present again when the apples finally come home from the orchard. The blossom and the harvest may look like opposite moments, but they are really two visible points within the same movement. One is the beginning of the promise and the other is its fulfillment. Between them, the tree spends months doing work that we barely notice, and afterward it retreats into a season when the work becomes even harder for us to see.

We often notice the importance of a harvest most clearly when it is no longer available. We notice how much work went into a garden when the pantry begins to empty. We notice the apple tree when the last fruit has been gathered and the branches stand bare. We notice the comfort to be found in the warmth of summer after the first cold evening reminds us that it is gone. The presence of abundance can become so ordinary that we forget it is temporary. Harvest interrupts that forgetfulness because it asks us to gather what has been given while acknowledging that the season that produced it is already passing away.

That feels particularly appropriate within a Norse understanding of the worlds. We sometimes talk about Norse cosmology as though it were moving along a straight road from creation toward Ragnarök, as though the great story is simply one long march toward destruction. Yet the mythology does not actually leave us there. The world after Ragnarök is green again. Life returns. Survivors remain. It is cyclical rather than a straight line. The story does not conclude with existence permanently extinguished. Something has ended, but something else emerges from what remains.

Perhaps that is why regeneration feels more appropriate to Iðunn than simple immortality. Which is where I would bring this interpretation back into modern practice. When I call Iðunn the Harvest Queen, I am giving a name to the relationship I see in the material we actually possess. I see a goddess whose apples stand at the meeting place between growth and renewal, between nourishment and continued life, between what time takes away and what can be restored. I see a fruit that begins as blossom and ends as nourishment, only to become part of another living cycle.

The harvest, then, is not merely what the earth produces. It is what we manage to carry forward. Food can carry nourishment into the months ahead. Seeds can carry the possibility of another garden. A story can carry a memory long after the person who lived it is gone. Even what we return to the earth becomes part of what comes next. The harvest is the point where what has grown during one portion of the year is gathered and given another purpose, and Iðunn fits beautifully into that threshold because her particular power has always been concerned with what happens when something living must be carried through change rather than simply left behind.

That understanding is what eventually led me to bring Iðunn into my own garden practice. At the beginning of the growing season, I do not simply put a representation of the “apple goddess” into the garden and ask her to watch over my plants. I appoint her as the keeper of continuation. Jörð has her place in my work with the seedlings and early growth, where I turn toward the earth itself and ask for those first fragile roots to take hold and establish themselves. Gerðr has her place among the herbs and the richness of the growing things, where I work with her around fertility and healing. Iðunn’s role is different. I think of her as the quiet warder who watches over what has already begun, carrying its vitality through the long middle of the growing season until it reaches the point where it can finally be gathered.

So when I establish Iðunn’s place in the garden, I give her more than an apple. I give her a presence. I might use a representation of her along with raiments, a basket, and the small baubles that have become part of my relationship with her, creating a place that belongs to her for the duration of the growing season. The basket becomes particularly important because it gives me somewhere to place the things I am entrusting to her care. With each new moon or full moon, I can put a written wish, intention, prayer, offering, or piece of spell-work inside it. I am not asking her to produce the thing immediately or to somehow make the physical work of the garden unnecessary. I am placing it into the keeping of a goddess whose mythology already gives me an image of something being tended until its vitality can be renewed and brought forth. To hold it and carefully nourish it until the time for fruition is at hand.

The garden grows around those offerings while Iðunn keeps watch. The seeds still need to be planted. The plants still need water, sunlight, pruning, protection, and attention. I still have to do the work that belongs to me. The weather will do whatever the weather intends to do, and the earth will remain the earth whether I am pleased with it or not. Iðunn does not replace any of those things, nor do I understand her as needing to. Her place is in the continuation of the process, in that long stretch between the first promise of growth and the moment when the result of all that work finally becomes visible as harvest.

That is what makes the basket more meaningful to me than simply having somewhere to leave offerings. Each thing I place inside it has time to become something else. A wish that feels uncertain in spring may look very different by autumn. A piece of written spell-work may have unfolded in ways I could not have predicted when I first placed it there. An intention may have required patience rather than immediate action. The plants themselves are doing exactly the same thing. The blossom does not become an apple by demanding that the tree hurry. It becomes an apple because the tree continues doing what trees do, day after day, while the fruit develops in its own time. Iðunn’s place in that process gives me a way of acknowledging that continuation without pretending that renewal is effortless.

When the last apples have fallen and the final harvest has been brought inside, I do not see that as the moment when Iðunn’s work has failed or comes to an end. It is the point where the visible portion of her work has been completed, and that means the relationship has to change again. The baskets come inside. The beds are cleared. The remaining plants are cut back or left to return what they can to the soil. The garden begins to withdraw from the outward work of growing, and I return Iðunn’s representation to the earth in a deliberate act of closure.

If I have created an effigy for her during the growing season, I burn it in the fall, allowing the physical image that has carried her presence through the garden to become ash. The offerings and written pieces of spell-work that have accumulated in her basket can be treated in the same way, according to what is appropriate for the particular working. What has been entrusted to Iðunn does not need to be carried indefinitely from one growing season into another. It can be transformed and returned. I am not declaring the work finished in the sense of something being discarded because it is no longer useful. I am releasing what has accumulated through the growing season back into the greater cycle. The representation becomes ash, and the ash returns to the earth. The written wishes and workings are transformed rather than simply stored away. What has been held in the garden through the months of growth is given back to the soil, the roots, the unseen life beneath the surface, and everything that will eventually become part of another season.

That is the part of the practice that makes the title Harvest Queen feel right to me. Iðunn does not simply preside over what comes out of the garden. She stands at the point where what has grown must be carried onward. She is there when the first fragile possibility begins to develop, she remains with it while the season does its work, and she is there again when what has been produced is gathered and released into whatever comes next. Her work is not about holding onto abundance forever. It is about keeping life moving through its necessary changes.

And then I remember the thing that matters more than the fruit itself: the harvest was never only about what came home. It was about what we allowed to be renewed.